I’ve had three different conversations today about our massive journalism literacy problem in the U.S., including a media interview that ended up going a lot of directions because it’s such a layered topic.

I am not giving up on this until we get policy change.

I’ve been beating this drum for 12 years now. The public largely doesn't understand journalism, its methods, and what separates it from content. And journalists too often don’t know how to explain their work to the public.

Huge education gap here, and it’s hurting our democracy.

Case study I’m thinking about today is what’s happening on the Instagram of our student publication @LUBrownWhite after they covered Trump’s visit here on Monday. Note how anti-Trump folks don’t understand journalism’s role here. https://bit.ly/34B5idX 

This was a learning experience for the student journalists. Their coverage crossed platforms and they thought of it that way. The public sometimes consumes only one channel and overreacts. The students did a great job on the coverage, but the public reacted to it on one platform.

But beyond that, merely calling out the paper for covering it was just crazy to me. Merely covering something is now promoting it?

But if you step back, Instagram is largely a promotion and influence network. People are consuming it through that lens.

This is a real challenge. How to convert journalism to these spaces that have different vibes, rules and cultures. How to promote coverage cross-platform.

But also on the consumption side, how the public reacts to what it encounters, and whether it can think critically about it.

You should read the live Twitter thread @LUBrownWhite posted. They were fact checking him in real time. Lots of truth sandwich. It was textbook, and couldn’t be more proud as a professor. It was that good.

But Instagram folks didn’t see it. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

But largely, the public doesn’t seem to know that journalism is rooted in publishing what you can verify and challenging information that you can’t. Look at what happened with the NYP laptop nonsense. Accusations the news is ignoring it, which, yeah. They can’t verify it.

My plan would include: Information literacy rooted in critical thinking and source evaluation before you critique the actual information. But journalism is an important subset under that umbrella. Understanding PR and partisan goals, how info in real time differs than slower info

And more broadly, we need to educate the public about journalism practice as methodology, so the public has a rubric judging good shops from bad ones.

Our need right now is teaching the public to know how to spot good coverage and outlets that consistently deliver good coverage.

Both of those last two matter. Message credibility isn’t just about the actual story. It’s about the trustworthiness in general of who reported it.

I don’t like it when students just say Fox News is bad without being able to articulate why with evidence, for example.

The new wrinkle to an old problem is understanding information vectors. Allegations online aren’t always legitimate. Partisan cries of media bias sometimes are lies or rhetoric to serve an electoral agenda.

Thinking about who is saying what, how info surfaces, and what ulterior motives claimants might have is hard.

Journalists do this all the time. It’s honestly most of the job. We have to teach the public how to do this too. Helps them evaluate news AND understand news choices.

This is why journalism curriculum is so valuable, even if it’s just a class or two. It teaches how to synthesize complex streams of information, ask hard questions, be skeptical, and then report what we can verify and know with some precision. Vital skill for citizens today.